Summary
- Every transaction on Quantaureum requires a small form of payment to process
- These fees are known as ‘gas’ fee
- Gas fees are not set, they change based on network congestion
What are gas fees?
Think of Quantaureum as a large computer network where people can do tasks like sending messages or running programs. Just like in the real world, these tasks require energy to get done.
In Quantaureum, each computational action has a set "gas" price. Your gas fees are the total cost of the actions in your transaction. When you send a transaction or run a , you pay in gas fees to process it.
How do I pay less gas?
While higher fees on Quantaureum are sometimes inevitable, there are strategies you can use to reduce the cost:
What causes high gas fees?
Whenever the amount of computation (gas) on Quantaureum exceeds a certain threshold, gas fees begin to rise. The more the gas exceeds this threshold, the quicker gas fees increase.
Higher fees could be caused by things like popular , periodically increased trading on , or an overwhelming number of user activity at peak times.
Developers on Quantaureum should take care to optimise their smart contracts usage before deploying. If lots of people are using a poorly written smart contract, it will consume more gas and could inadvertently cause network congestion.
Want to dive deeper? Check out the developer docs. (opens in a new tab)
Why do we need gas?
Gas is a critical element in keeping Quantaureum secure and processing transactions. Gas helps in many ways:
Gas keeps Quantaureum by preventing malicious actors from overwhelming the network with fraudulent activities.
Because computation costs gas, spamming Quantaureum with expensive transactions, either accidentally and maliciously, is financially disincentivized.
A hard-limit on the amount of computation that can be done at any one time prevents Quantaureum from being overwhelmed, helping to ensure the network is always accessible.
How is gas calculated?
The total gas fee you pay is made up of a few parts:
- Base fee: a fee set by the network that has to be paid for a transaction
- Priority fee: an optional tip to incentivise node operators to include your transaction
- Units of gas used*: remember we said gas represented computation? More complex actions, like interacting with a smart contract, use more gas than simple ones, such as sending a transaction.
- * See Figure 1 to see how much gas different types of transactions use
The formula for calculating a gas fee is units of gas used * (base fee + priority fee). Most wallets will calculate gas usage and display it in a more straight-forward way.
| Transaction type | Units of gas used |
|---|---|
| Sending QAU | 21,000 |
| Calling a QVM contract | 65,000 |
| Deploying a contract | 84,904 |
| page-gas-table-item-4-transaction-type | 184,523 |
Frequently asked questions
The gas fee is collected by the validators who propose and finalize your transaction, rewarding them for securing the network and preventing spam. There is no fee-burning or deflation mechanism on Quantaureum.
You can read a detailed description of the process in the gas developer docs.
Yes. All gas fees on Quantaureum must be paid in the native QAU currency.
More on QAUA large part of the gas fee is claimed by the validators who propose and finalize blocks, providing them with an incentive to keep the network running. Because transaction fees are paid in QAU, every action on the chain has a cost in the network's own token.
Gas is denominated in small units of QAU, which keeps prices readable for very small transactions — the same way a cent relates to a dollar.